Slide Down My Rainbarrel

 
Ce-ce my playmate,
Come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree
Slide down my rainbarrel,
Into my cellar door
And we'll be jolly friends,
For-ev-er-more


We bought a new rainbarrel today. This is so that we can have a 3-and-2 arrangement. It’s not that we need to hoard so much water against the coming dry months of July and August. It’s for a different reason.

Once you’ve cut the opening to chain a rainbarrel with another one, there is no easy way to close it. (For your edification, duct tape doesn’t work.) So when our middle rainbarrel from last year became the end barrel for this year, it had an unneeded extra opening.

Lots and lots of water flowed through that opening this rainy weekend, into a window well with poor drainage. Poor drainage and a non-waterproof basement window. Guess where all that water is now? That’s right. It’s in our basement.

So anyway, the solution to our outdoor water woes was simply to buy a new rainbarrel. We still had an unspent Home Depot gift card from Christmas, so we put those funds towards it.

The funds to renovate the basement are coming from our 2006 (now 2007) vacation savings.

But that’s a whole other story. 

Braving Rural Traffic Jams in the Pursuit of Cheap Mulch

We visited the "gardening ghetto" today, a stretch of rural highway lined with nurseries and greenhouses. My husband has been poring over the ads and flyers in the local newspaper, looking for the best price on bagged cedar mulch so we can finish the majority of the work that remains in the back.

After fighting traffic jams at crossroads with only flashing yellow lights, and endangering the health of our station wagon's suspension, we returned from our trip with 24 bags of regular cedar mulch.

My husband was busy in the garden this afternoon. First, he removed the ratty hinoki cyprus. It's a beautiful evergreen, but whatever it requires to make it look lush and healthy, we were not able to provide; so now it's gone and the garden looks better for it.

Then my husband covered the better part of the back yard using about half of the mulch we bought. You can see the result of his effort in this photo I took of a chickadee perched on the birdbath.


Photo belongs to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be borrowed without attribution.

An Evening in the Garden with My Camera

This evening in the garden with my camera resulted in these photos.


Yellow Iris



Backlit Purple Iris Bud



Pink Tulip 19 Days Old



Spiderwort and Bugleweed



I Call it Centaurea (Because I Don't Like "Bachelor's Button")


Photos belong to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be borrowed without attribution.

A Repost of Sorts: Constructing a Garden

[NOTE: This is a more detailed rewrite of a post from August 13 last year.]

I don't like the term "garden rooms" but I do use the concept in the layout of the garden. The first things that defined our backyard garden layout were the deck, the patio, and three trees. The deck had to be in a certain place because of the back exit. The patio naturally filled the remaining "floor space" at the back of the house.


We started out with a natural wood deck, and never thought of staining it. However, a couple of bad seasons with paper wasps chewing on the naked wood to build their nearby nests convinced us that staining was the way to go. We chose an opaque stain in a blue-grey colour ("Heritage Blue" by Behr). This has turned out really well with both the patio brick (2002) and the natural flagstone (2003, 2005) that were eventually installed around it.



2002

Our first thought of a GARDEN was to plant three trees (2002): a Deborah maple close to the deck for shade and privacy; a camperdown elm farther back on the east side as an interesting ornamental; and a devil's claw willow somewhat near the back property line on the west side of the garden. The devil's claw willow was chosen for its interesting curly branches. Little did we know how fast it would grow from a sapling to a full-size tree!



2003

After joining in with the neighbours to install the back fence, the next thing for us was to hire a landscaper to complete the transformation from boring slope to beautiful "garden bones" by installing strategically placed armour stone. First they killed all the grass, then brought in loads of rocks and dirt, and finally they planted a small amount of new grass. They also created a flagstone path around the deck, and in the NW corner a level patch of grit on which we could get our new wooden shed installed.


With that, the landscapers were finished. Then, doing the work ourselves, we laid down some mulch (five cubic yards -- they still sell it in yards, even though this is Canada and it should be metres) and started planting. The planting hasn't stopped since, though we are running out of room now so it's slowed down a lot. And because of planting a lot of evergreens and groundcover, we no longer need five cubic yards of mulch in spring when we put it down. We can get by with three, maybe three-and-a-half yards.


We also laid some flagstone stepping stones (just plunked down and rearranged year by year however we feel like it) to define some of the area that was meant to be kept free for walking rather than planted on; and by early Fall 2003, after getting the shed installed and building the arbour bench, the garden looked like this:

Photos belong to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be borrowed without attribution.
(I know no one would want these photos, but still.)

The evolution of the side path (a continuation of the flagstone path around the deck and along the west side of the house) is covered step-by-step in the August archives.

Tulips in Morning Light

Captured this photo of tulips this morning:

   Photo belongs to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be borrowed without attribution.

A Walk In God's Garden (aka The Great Outdoors)

The title is an oblique reference to my favourite gardening joke.

A woman was tending her front garden as the vicar approached. He paused, leaned over the front wall and and said to her, "Isn't it wonderful what God can do in a garden?"

The woman responded, "You should have seen it when He had it all to himself."

Armed with a camera I went walking through the woodlands near our home. I felt it was a good time to take pictures, since the trilliums were blooming.



I know people grow these in their garden, but since I was a young child I have had a kind of built-in reverence for this flower, the provincial flower of Ontario. We were taught not to pick them or damage them. Because it sank in at such an early age, I can't seem to shake that feeling that the flower is not to be touched.

I took photographs, though.





Elsewhere on my walk I found a smallish patch of some flowers that look like cranesbill. Does cranesbill grow wild in southern Ontario woodlands? Or did this escape from someone's garden long ago? Or is it not cranesbill at all, but something else? I wish I knew. [EDIT: I found web sites that state that cranesbill does grow wild in Southern Ontario.]



(And speaking of crane's bill, I was able to snap a (not very good) picture of a blue heron in a tree.)

Finally, I wanted to provide an illustration of how invasive garlic mustard is. It's everywhere along the path I was walking. The city was doing some maintenance, mowing the sides of the path, and I figured out where the name comes from. The delicious (if you like salads and Italian cooking) scent of garlic was everywhere.

Why Do You Blog About Your Garden?

"It’s mainly a lot of people showing off their gardens. Which is cool..."

That description of GardenVoices from another garden blogger makes me want to discuss garden blogging in general.

Maybe that statement touched a nerve or something, I'm not sure. It certainly has been gratifying on this blog to get everyone's comments and questions about my garden, and I love the way the internet allows me to connect with people around the world and see their gardens too.


"With hey, ho, the wind and the rain."
(Farewell, white tulips, May 15.)
But when I first got the idea to start blogging, I had a different goal in mind. I had all these photographs on my hard drive, divided roughly into years, then months, ostensibly to keep a record of what was going on in the garden so I would know from one year to the next what things looked like. The trouble is, with only a collection of (roughly) dated photographs, there is not enough information. I knew I needed a gardening journal to keep track of what was blooming when, and what to expect from month to month. In a journal I could state with confidence, for example, that my 'My Hope' daylily first bloomed on yada, yada, yada...


Centaurea Buds, May 15
Thing is, if I think only of myself as the audience, I write differently than if I assume I have other readers. (I can't help it; I have a degree in Professional Writing. Thinking about who will be reading my words affects the way they are written.) So my blog changed along the way from mostly a journal to more of a showcase.


Poppy Buds, May 15
Another thing that happened was that my photographs became less about recording the state of the garden at a given time (the location of a new planting, for example) and more about exploring what I could do with the camera as a brush and the garden as a canvas. Once you start taking photographs for photography's sake, you start wanting to display your best results to anyone who will look. Showing off, as it were.


The weigela I purchased has buds already.
The one in the garden is just getting its leaves.
So, yeah, that description of garden blogging touched a nerve. I came to this as a journal, but it's evolved into a showcase. I can't change it back. But the original purpose of the blog as a gardening journal has not changed. And next year, because of this blog, I will be armed with so much better information about when things started and finished blooming.

So, I'm wondering. All you garden bloggers out there: Why do you blog about your garden?

Snug as a Bug in...

...an iris?


Something horrible no doubt has burrowed its way into my irises.

Possibly the same hungry creature (or one of its relatives) has chewed some holes in the leaves, too.

Mom's Garden

What better post for Mother's Day than pictures of my mom's garden? Many people who garden will say they got their love of gardening from their mom. But in my case, it might actually be the other way around, since my mom has only lately discovered gardening as a leisure activity.

But regardless of which one of us influenced the other, the gardening gene is from my mom's side, as my uncle owns a landscaping business in Britain, and I still remember eating brussels sprouts from my grandad's garden when we visited there in my childhood.



This Japanese Maple is my mom's pride and joy right now:



They've had some work done in the back, too.



This natural flagstone patio at the base of the deck is just waiting for all the steppables to fill in the open spaces between the stones. (Mom has planted little cuttings of woolly thyme and elfin thyme, and not all of them survived, although most of them are doing very well.) I think the metal furniture they picked out is perfect for this setting.

And finally, since mom and I were shopping together that day, I should note that she picked up the "sister" to my little fairy girl.


Photos belong to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be borrowed without attribution.

3H Gardening

Well the garden is really changing a lot every day now. I keep discovering new little things happening that I hadn't noticed before. Like this 'Johnson's Blue' Cranesbill, or Hardy Geranium, that just got its first bloom.


I love how "real gardeners" will make a point of saying that those ubiquitous basket stuffers everyone else calls geraniums are not really geraniums. (I think it's just a bit of secret information, like a special handshake, by which those knowledgeable gardeners recognize each other.)

On a different note, it turns out there are plenty of gardeners on Flickr. I found a group devoted to pictures of "hosta, heuchera, and hemerocallis". It makes sense that others would come up with 3H gardening, but I still like to think of it as my own invention. I almost named my blog "3H Gardening" because of my obsession with hemerocallis, heuchera, and hosta.

There will be no daylilies until late June, so I will have to be content with posting photos of hosta and heuchera for now.




And as a final unrelated bonus, I really like the way this photo of white tulips and iris turned out, so I am posting here too.

A Long Drink of Water

The garden is responding well to the rain, especially in the back where all the colours and textures are starting to "pop". The star of the show today is this dwarf iris ('Grape Orbit') I just planted on the weekend. There were no signs of any blooms when I planted it.


I am really loving black mulch for providing a perfect backdrop to all the colourful foliage and flowers. You can see the difference between black mulch and regular mulch over by the elm, where we have a path of brown mulch that wraps around the back of the tree.


The variegated leaves of 'Patriot' hosta, and the beautiful chartreuse colour of 'Sweet Kate' spiderwort look particularly good against the black mulch. The only thing the black colour doesn't do much for is dark foliage like 'Obsidian' heuchera, or 'Chocolate Chip' ajuga (bugleweed) without its blooms. 'Peach Flambe' heuchera and 'Gold Bullion' centaurea look really nice, though.


Luckily right now the bugleweed is blooming, so we can enjoy its tiny purple spikes for the next little while until it disappears into the background again.


You can see them down at the front of the border under the maple in this view.


In among the tulips by the chain link fence, the irises are really starting to come into their own. That dwarf iris has plenty of friends back there.

Those Red Tulips

The final fate of those red tulips:



Here is my new centrepiece, a collection of miniature tulips in a yellow circa-1970s Czech glass vase (One of the good things about being an Art Glass collector is that you always have a choice of vases to display flowers in.)

Garden Visitors

A lot of people have butterfly and hummingbird gardens because they want to attract certain types of colourful "visitors" to their garden. But what if, like me, you want all different types of creatures to visit?

Well, you can plant a mix of trees and bushes, which we have duly done. (The trees are helping with privacy too.) And you can provide food.

A word about what food to provide: black oil sunflower seeds. (Thistle seed for finches, but only a reliable brand name, unless you want a carpet of thistle sprouts.)

Our warehouse store changed its supply of seed, so we decided to try a birdseed blend instead of our usual. Well, the result has been interesting.



The squirrels have all but disappeared. The grackles have taken over. They use their big beaks to toss the yellow seed all over the place, hunting for the few black oil sunflower seeds in the mix.

To top it off, at least black oil sunflower seeds are black, which is a good colour to blend into the ground around the feeder. Now we have a big pile of yellow mess to look at, no squirrels to amuse us, and big fat grackles showing their disdain for our seeds. I somehow don't think we will continue this experiment any longer than we have to.

Tons o' Tulips

Well, it's tulip season. There is not much blooming action in the garden really that does not involve tulips. (Note to self, need a few more mid-spring-flowering plants scattered through the garden.)

I'm going to post another collage. That's because I have so many tulip pictures I feel it would be overwhelming to post them all.

(Oh, and if you think this is bad, wait till the daylilies start. Then this blog becomes "all daylilies, all the time".)

Yes, It's Probably Too Early

I know, I know. I can feel the chill in the air at night. But I just had the need to fill some containers.



My mom brought me a gift of coleus on Friday (which survived the cold, barely), and my son actually volunteered to come with me to the garden centre while my husband was spreading black mulch in the backyard this afternoon. I'm thinking I must have done something right to deserve this.


On a different note, I have discussed with some of my gardening friends about "cheating" on the containers by buying hanging baskets and planting them as patio containers. That is almost what I did today. I bought premade arrangements and transferred them to larger containers, in some cases adding to them as well.

Here is the container combo my son urged me to buy:


I do think he likes yellow snapdragons.